From Mozart To Wagner — How To Make Scrum Sprints Resonate With More Than Business Goals
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. When was the last time you engaged your team with something both fun and informative? Here’s a story of how me and my team learned new Scrum tricks with some help of classical music composers.
3PM, we’re in the middle of a Sprint Review with stakeholders from 3 different timezones. The team is already exhausted, yet we get to the point, we conclude the event with take aways for the Sprint Planning.
Still, something was missing.
We were bored. The team loved the product, we enjoyed collaborating with all these people from all over the world, business and developers alike, contributing to product development from many different perspectives. Yet, the air was extremely still, and we needed something to stir things up.
Then, The Development Team started to debate:
–Maybe we could do something fun. Let’s name sprints. I’m fed up with working on “Sprint 25”, I wanna work on something epic. I wanna be like: this sprint is a Beethoven sprint!
–And what if, apart from giving names to sprints, we could use it to learn something new? Jan, do you think you could do some agile storytelling around sprint patrons?
That’s how we started discovering more about Scrum and Agile with a little help from friends that didn’t have any idea what software development was.
Every Sprint Planning we nominated one of the masters of music composition to be the patron of the Sprint we had just started. Each Sprint, I prepared a short talk to introduce the team to the career and works of the artist, and use them as metaphors of our everyday life in software development.
The Sprints Are Alive With The Sound Of Music
There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres. – Pythagoras
Music has a lot of things in common with maths and programming. Music is an abstract form of expression using notes that represent sound waves, arranged in sets and sequences, that program emotional reactions in human beings. Programming is an abstract form of expression using code that represents logic, arranged in instructions and algorithms, that program computers to solve problems. Both work with abstraction, composition, and logic.
What else is similar? Think of scales as different languages and frameworks. Think of the Circle of Fifths and harmonics as a set of functions. The notation argument between Chopin and Liszt is equally passionate as the tabs vs. spaces debacle.
How about software development teams? Aren’t they like symphony orchestras? Writing software, as well as writing and performing music, is as much a cooperative, as an individualistic thing to do. An orchestra, although it nearly always works with a composed and complete piece of music, has to express lots of agility.
There’s a lot of cross-functional vibe, but there are also roles that one has to take up. The Conductor — clearly being the Product Owner and listening in to the big picture. If we consider The Brass Section the back end of the orchestra, The Strings and Woodwinds would then be the shiny and sparkling front end.
Among them, there’s also another protagonist called The Concertmaster. I don’t know if you know, but one of The Concertmaster’s abundant duties is to lead the orchestra in tuning before concerts. If they believe that a section of instruments is not tuned appropriately, they signal the oboe player to give another A sound to repeat the tuning sequence. Well, Does it ring a bell?
The world of music gives plenty of fertile ground for educational games and making work fun. Take a look at some of the heroes of our Sprints, and what lessons we learned from them.
Maurice Ravel: The Mastermind of Increment
One word: Bolero.
Just listen. Listen to the entire piece (~17 minutes), then go back to the beginning. Then skip to minute 5:00. Then to 10:00. See what’s changed? Do you hear The Increment?
Modest Mussorgsky: Sprints Before They Were Cool
One of his prominent works, exemplifying his unique compositional style, is Pictures at an Exhibition from 1874, composed as a piano suite in an act of homage and rememberance to the paintings of Victor Hartmann.
The suite is structured by variations of Promenade that introduce every chapter — a fully contained, independent story. After the story concludes, the listener reflects on it, then is led back to the gallery, and plans which artwork to admire next.
Also, Pictures at an Exhibition were subsequently redesigned several times—that is — arranged for a full orchestra by none other than Maurice Ravel, and also performed by a progressive rock band Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: The Genius Contractor
This one is dedicated especially to those making a difference in software development agencies, where the client is always right and the product is almost entirely externally governed.
Mozart wrote several hundred pieces of music, many of them considered humanity’s finest achievements in classical composition. A few know, that many of his masterpieces were actually contracted jobs. During a significant part of his career he worked as a court musician for the ruler of Salzburg, Prince-Archbishop Hieronymus von Colloredo, and composed on comission for the Emperor himself.
Mozart was able to merge virtuosity with earning for a living, which is pretty much we all strive for. He also died miserably composing the legendary Requiem, so guys, take care of your company culture and work-life balance (this is, naturally, an oversimplification of his curriculum vitae, but proves a point).
Ludwig van Beethoven: The Innovator
One of the things they say about Ludvig van is that a huge part of his career he remained in the shadows of Mozart and the splendor that came along with his developing talent. It’s also certain, that during his entire life he was an example of courage, focus, openness, and commitment. Grosse Fuge, created in his late years, was considered an innovation sparkle that reignited the musical Avantgarde in the early 1900s.
He may have had some problems with respect for his colleagues composers, but obviously, he couldn’t possibly know much about Scrum values back in the XIX century.
Richard Wagner: Total Cross-functional Art
Gesamtkunstwerk — the synthesis of the arts — is the artistic and aesthetic mindset Wagner embraced. He believed that art should strive for many forms interacting and collaborating together. Der Ring des Nibelungen, his most famous opera epic, is not only a musical masterpiece – he also wrote the libretto and oversaw many of the production design details.
Der Ring des Nibelungen’s costumes from the first opera productions in 1870s are also the reason why everyone thinks that real Vikings wore horned helmets. This was in fact totally not true.
Leonard Bernstein: The Grand Coach
I love Bernstein for two reasons: he changed the world of musical theater with West Side Story, and he was a remarkable educator and mentor. His Young People’s Concerts series changed my view not only on classical music, and was one of the reasons I did some musical training in my early years, but also changed the entire perspective I had on acquiring knowledge.
He taught me that there’s always an opportunity to learn new things, even if it’s related to work, or even if it’s very hard. He filled his lectures with examples and anecdotes, that created a whole new didactic experience. He understood Kaizen and Shu-ha-ri before it was even remotely related to software development. He was the Henrik Kniberg of the world of music.
Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish (All Over Again)
Our story of exploring how Scrum and the tech industry work, using the context of classical music, ends with this talk by Benjamin Zander, an English conductor, currently the musical director of the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra:
Let me add something to it: use the transformative power of anything that brings inspiration, fun, a breath of freash air, and a new context to your every day work. Nobody thought that music can be anyhow related to Scrum and software, yet there it is.
Strive for better understanding, more engagement, less boredom. Teach others by learning something yourself. Be open and respectful of others, be focused and committed, and finally be courageous, and you will never work another day in your life.
